1/ The Government of Canada should make a pandemic management app before the private sector does, so we can make sure the data indeed remains private (this is assuming we can trust the government on that front, which admittedly is one helluva leap of faith in 2020)...
2/ An app like this could be an extremely effective tool in helping to beat the 🦠, the catch being that more effective the tool, the more personal data users would have to provide.
3/ examples: An app tracking location of users could help significantly with tracing, alerting other users if they have been in the close vicinity of someone who fell ill in recent days...
4/ The app could also offer up diagnostic screening based on questionnaire and provide links and updated information to users based on their location, and potentially help with tracing if users’ contacts were shared with public health authorities...
5/ I would hope such a thing would be voluntary and provide mostly anonymized data (hence whoever puts it together would need strong public oversight). Ironically this is the kind of personal info many of us provide to large corporations all the time (Google, Amazon, Apple, etc.)
6/ Seen examples from China of phone data like this being used by authorities to track (and punish) people defying quarantine. Political leaders here have expressed reluctance about that level of surveillance - but if the 🥕 method doesn’t show results, we know stick will come.😬
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A very important paper was published yesterday, discussing the feasibility of limiting global warming to 1.5°C when considering a range of existing constraints.👇
The findings are indeed daunting, but maybe not as hopeless as many on this website seem to imply...
Quick 🧵
2/ The study reviews chances of keeping global warming to within Paris Agreement bounds of 1.5C to 2.0C given the latest understandings of 5 key constraints: geophysical; technological; institutional; socio-cultural; and economic...
3/ They find that while it is possible - despite existing constraints - to remain below 1.6 °C of peak warming (which is a 'low overshoot' temperature which could eventually be brought back down to 1.5C), the *likelihood* of doing so is now below 50%...
2/ There've been many June heatwaves like this in the US before. And, the daily mean temp anomaly for Wednesday, June 19th (the peak day of the heat dome) wasn't very exceptional in much of the US East... (for that given day of the year).
3/ If we look at the month of June across the US SOUTHEAST going back to 1895, we can see that the region has been plenty warm before during the month of June (this record goes up to 2023)!
1) The thread noted a divide between what I called “accelerationists” who were sounding alarm that 2023’s remarkable warming was the beginning of SOMETHING NEW, and those I (later) called “observationalists”, who claimed 2023’s extreme warmth fits within EXPECTED WARMING trends.
2) These positions continue to be expressed. @MichaelEMann, for instance, is adamant that “the truth [about global warming] is bad enough”; that the warming we saw in 2023 can be explained by known climate physics; and that 2023 fits within the modelled warming.
This post by @FoodProfessor claims that the Trudeau Government purposely built the @ClimateInstit and @SP_Inst as part of its "lobbying machine" and that they are "mandated to advocate blindly" for the carbon tax.
This is a baseless claim.
Thread...🧵
1) This story starts in 1988 when the Mulroney government created an Independent advisory council of experts called the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy. For 25 years it produced numerous reports on environmental policy, advising governments.
2) Then in 2013 the Harper government cancelled the NREE's funding because it did not like the advice it was receiving (in particular regarding carbon pricing). News story about it here: cbc.ca/news/politics/…
I don't know if the left has ever been unified, but today there seems to be a massive and growing rift about the environment - and especially climate - amongst socialists.
I now worry these differences are irreconcilable...
2. The discord seems to come down to fundamentally different worldviews shaping interpretations and definitions of modernity, development, progress, capitalism, justice, Marx's intentions, strategy, the future...
Many people seem absolutely fed up with "the other side". FED. UP.
3. The Degrowth Left (and this is sure to be a caricature of 'the ideology', not thinking of any one individual) seems FED UP with what it believes Ecomodern Socialism is: a sort of capitalism-as-usual in disguise...
It's worth emphasizing that because the scheduled carbon tax rate increase is flat ($15/tonne/year through to 2030), the *relative* weight increase declines over time.
There's a few ways that the carbon tax increase may *feel* less consequential as time goes on. Mini 🧵
First, as Chris has pointed out, this year it's a 23% increase on the tax rate relative to last year. But next year it will be an 18.75% increase and so on until it just stays fixed at $170/tonne - no longer increasing any more, year after year...
Second, due to inflation, the relative weight of an increase could also decline.
Ex: Currently the tax *increase* adds about 3.3c per litre ($17.6c/L). A 50L tank of gas has $8.80 tax. If the avg pre-tax gas price goes up, the relative size of the tax increase per tank declines.